It’s a lot to pin “voice of a generation” on writers and artists – it certainly didn’t do Lena Dunham any favours. But inside the panels of contemporary comics, there does exist a keen understanding of what it means to be a 20- or 30-something in a world overtaken by a new age of anxiety. And maybe that’s because of the marriage of words and image, perhaps best exemplified in the hands of Canadian illustrator and Governor General Award-winner Jillian Tamaki and her distinct ability to bring her own lived perspective to the page.

Her latest solo collection, Boundless – heavy in its rumination and hilarious in its earnestness –drips with a certain melancholy and longing, a common mode for modern illustrators (Adrian Tomine, Vanessa Davis) who dabble in realism, ever-bent on nostalgic trips. Not that Boundless comes from one specific place or mood: very much following her title’s lead, Tamaki says there are “definitely no intentional themes, but of course, themes will arise since they’re generated from the same psyche.”

Reynard Li

Much like Tomine’s Killing and Dying or Davis’s recent Spaniel Rage, Tamaki presents literary therapy on a plate, one that first requires a trip down misery lane. Boundless is, after all, coated in a deep sense of angst, with a look at issues such as body image, the dangers of the internet and social media, and intimacy.

But while Tamaki’s collected works do feel considerably intimate, for the artist at least, that doesn’t make her work on different platforms – from magazine covers to television storyboarding – any less personal, though shifting from creating for herself to creating for a specific audience with a specific assignment is no easy feat.

“It’s a bit of a psychological trick,” she says. “I guess it has helped that I have always juggled both for the entirety of my career, so it’s a balance I’m used to. I think ‘creating for yourself’ is a misnomer. Currently, I’m more preoccupied in how to construct a (personal) story, but sometimes a purely commercial illustration job can feel like a bit of a blessing because it demands less of your personality.”

Her personality appears as nuanced in images as it does in story, explored so broadly that it’s no wonder commercial jobs are often a relief for the artist. When asked which themes jump off the page for her, Tamaki mentions a wide range in concept: a desire for connection, utopia, identity, confinement, hope and transcendence.

“I guess I find the undulating themes more interesting than a cohesive statement or thread,” she adds. “Shorter stories were a bit of a response to working on long narratives, which are achievements and make publishers happy but take a really, really, really long time to incubate. I wanted to engage with a more direct way of comic-making. … Some are completely thought experiments. Some are rooted in very real times and places, some are fable-like. I am not really a fantasist though – I can’t really conjure stories from thin air. I am usually aiming to recreate an emotion (current or experienced in the past) or explore an idea I’m interested in.”

Drawn & Quarterly/Jillian Tamaki

As a result, even in the way Tamaki draws the body, the female body in particular, there is a sense of self-exploration, drawn in so many different ways, it’s almost as if a different artist is at work each time. In some, the body appears more confident, bold in her strong lines and curves, and in others, less so.

Drenched in baby blues and pinks when not in black and white, the aversion to colour throughout Boundless is customary Tamaki, lending an inherent softness or coldness to each panel, made all the more significant when juxtaposed with exclusively colourless vignettes.

“I actually am not a huge fan of colour,” she says. “I much prefer drawing. I try to use colour in a completely utilitarian way. Enough to add the appropriate amount of information.” So consider it a fill-in-the-blanks sort of read, less choose-your-own-adventure, more Rorschach.

Having compiled a collection that triggers such self-analysis, Tamaki offers a space to realize what it means to grow out of long-held anxieties, even as an adult. While she may not be catering to a YA audience this time, as she did in her collaboration with cousin Mariko Tamaki, This One Summer, it’s as if Tamaki is reminding us that we don’t always totally grow up. Our fears from when we’re younger can linger in the most minute and abstract ways, and Boundless feels like a physical manifestation of that.

“I have noticed a rise in the word ‘adulting’, which I thought we had left behind in the late 2000’s,” Tamaki says. “Clearly there is an anxiety in not growing up properly or something? As if childhood and adulthood are some sort of binary.”

Not so when it comes to Boundless which, as more of a mirror than a collection of loosely connected stories stitched together, it is a reckoning of self and all that scares us in the day-to-day, which is, at least in Tamaki’s eyes, the anxieties that are most in need of exorcising.